Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants Ricky Jay is a particularly fascinating case because he’s built an entire show around deceit: three-card monte, crooked poker, and the many elaborate ways a card can be made to show up when a card shark wants it to. Confidence is essential to his art. When he says, for example, that he’s using an ordinary deck of cards, we must trust him. I must believe that the deck he has is not much different from the sealed deck next to my keyboard, recently purchased from Walgreen’s....

“I really do think I’m living in a John Hughes film sometimes, and that’s just utterly ridiculous,” says performance artist Gina Lovoi. Her new autobiographical show, The Whole Juan Situation, bears some similarities to Hughes’s mid-80s work; in it a crazy crush that transcends social barriers torments a plucky heroine who is surrounded by the color pink. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story is a detailed saga of disappointment and humiliation....

Listening to Jeff Buckley’s mannered, anguished singing is like watching a high-wire act; you keep waiting for him to hyperventilate and fall into an abyss of melodrama, but the catastrophe never happens. Buckley often achieves an intimate, wistful vocal delivery recalling romantic European balladeers like Edith Piaf and Luciano Tajoli; his appropriations of the French chanson tradition (e.g., in his rendition of Piaf’s “Je n’en connais pas la fln”) are blessedly free of corny, theatrical overstatement....

Emerging Artists Project, at Cafe Voltaire. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Attempting any comedy crime for a laugh, Chrisi Collins perpetrates a clumsy remake of the Greek legend in which earth mother Demeter invades the underworld to rescue daughter Persephone from a forced marriage to Hades, prince of hell. The compromise worked out, of course, is that the four months of winter unleashed by Persephone’s yearly visit to her husband will be balanced by spring, summer, and fall....

Sound Bit “I don’t think there’s overwhelming evidence that community policing works,” said Friedman in his four seconds. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There was a long campaign by a coalition of community organizations called the Community Policing Task Force that put this on the city’s agenda in the first place,” Friedman told us. “A small number of community people participated in the training of the police officers for the prototype, and I think that’s fairly unique....

Moon Under Miami In John Guare’s exquisite comedy-drama Six Degrees of Separation, a young man pretending to be the son of Sidney Poitier cons his way into the home of a starstruck art collector, proving that even upper-class sophisticates can be had if you drop the right names. Eventually “Paul Poitier,” as the poseur calls himself, is exposed–betrayed in part by his self-delusion–but only after considerable damage has been done....

Bad craziness in the ‘burbs. Shortly after school began, 10,000 pounds of outdated canned and frozen food–some dated 1985–was discovered in a Michigan City, Indiana, high school kitchen and hauled to the local landfill, reports the daily News-Dispatch (September 15). “My concern,” said the school superintendent, “is that some of this was not noticed like it should have been.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The view from the bottom....

Patti Smith During my mercifully short tenure as an editor at Rolling Stone, one of my more tedious tasks was compiling the results of the 1995 critics poll. By a ridiculous margin of eight or nine to one, Patti Smith claimed “Comeback of the Year.” Yet her last original recording had been released in 1988. It should come as no surprise that now that there’s a new album–Gone Again–critics are falling all over themselves to give enough accolades....

Eleanor: An American Love Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when musicals were sometimes relevant, when composers like Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, and even George Gershwin used this consummately American art form as a means of social commentary as well as entertainment. Today, though–despite the every-season-or-two aberration–even the musical that attempts to address contemporary issues is still primarily a vehicle for nice costumes and hummable songs, preventing the audience from thinking too long or too hard....

THE MYSTERY CYCLE: CREATION God’s a hell of a storyteller, but he’s not much of a writer. Somehow those who took down his words managed to turn fantastic stories about wonderful characters into rigorous Sunday-school reading exercises. Court Theatre is trying to change that by resurrecting the medieval mystery plays that mined the Bible stories for both their moral and entertainment value, blazing through the Old and New Testaments in long dramatic performances that used contemporary references to deliver the Lord’s messages in a way members of all social classes could understand....

Servant of the People!! The Rise and Fall of Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party Alexander’s goal is twofold and challenging: to canonize Newton and to explore the violence and destruction that contradicted his ideals and destroyed the Panthers. Throughout the play Alexander explores the continuing problems that block positive social change in the African-American community: drug abuse, violence within the community, and racist policies and institutions. The narrator–a fictional pimp who joins the party–chants that “the end is the beginning,” foregrounding the play’s argument that organizations that depend on violence end in violence....

As half the potent but unassuming songwriting force in Australia’s late great Go-Betweens, Grant McLennan created unapologetically smart and elegant pop gems. His superb new album Horsebreaker Star (Beggars Banquet), his third solo outing and his most accomplished, acquits him of any alleged reliance on partner Robert Forster. Recorded last year in Athens (Georgia, not Greece) with a cast assembled by producer John Keane (R.E.M., Indigo Girls), the album sets McLennan’s beautiful, often oblique tunes within crisp, bracing folk-rock attacks that accent his distinct melodic skills without smothering them....

Plan 9 From Outer Space Others have attempted stage versions of Ed Wood’s famously awful films. The late, not-so-great Interplay fumbled an adaptation of Glen or Glenda several years ago. And just last fall psychotronic man-about-town Michael Flores adapted, directed, and manned the overpriced lobby concession stand for a stillborn version of The Bride and the Beast that left audiences begging for less. Both productions were dogged by indifferent direction and poor comic performances....

Metaluna and the Amazing By Carol Burbank Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The conceptual framework of this collaborative piece is simple even though the effect is quite complicated. The two-hour show is a supposed performance by an actual Dada troupe “reenacting” its tour to the backwater of Metaluna, Indiana. There they became part of an experiment run by Sigmund Freud and his brain surgeon friend, Dr....

LONNIE SHIELDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lonnie Shields gave us some tantalizing glimpses of his stylistic range on the rough but exuberant Portrait (Rooster Blues), his 1993 disc that was hailed by Living Blues magazine as the most impressive debut album of the last 20 years. On his recent Tired of Waiting (JSP), Shields narrows his focus, mostly eschewing three-chord aggression in favor of post-60s soul-blues stylings....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of Robert Anton Wilson’s best quips is: “Anyone in the United States today who isn’t paranoid must be crazy.” I’ll give Futrelle the benefit of the doubt, though, and won’t argue on the basis of Wilson’s exceedingly astute observation that he’s just a lunatic–not that Futrelle wouldn’t deserve to be dismissed so easily given his own eagerness to suggest that anybody trying to get to the bottom of things is wacky, unhinged, and so on....

Who the first rock critic was is a matter for debate; legend has it that the San Francisco Chronicle’s jazz writer, Ralph Gleason, was the first daily journalist to take the music on its own terms, just as the Dead and the Airplane were coming to prominence. In New York City, Richard Goldstein was writing serious commentary on the music for the Voice and the New York Times around then as well....

SKATALITES 3/18, METRO Long considered Jamaica’s first important ska group, the Skatalites are touring in support of their first legitimate domestic release, last year’s Ska Voovee (Shanachie). The group formed in the early 60s but split up in 1966, and despite a few intermittent attempts at reforming–largely fueled by the British ska revival spearheaded by bands like the Selecter and the Specials (who employed proto-ska trombonist Rico Rodriguez)–they basically remained defunct until a more recent revival led by saxophonist Tommy McCook....

DENTISTS 4/29, METRO This British quartet has been perfecting the lost art of crisp Anglo-pop for nearly a decade. In the Dentists’ music snappy melodies, soaring harmonies, and ringing guitars meet with punchy execution and punky energy. Eschewing much of the 60s flavor that spiced early singles like “Strawberries Are Growing in My Garden (and It’s Wintertime),” the Dentists crammed their new album, Behind the Door I Keep the Universe (East-West), with spunky, timeless, aftertaste-free gems that appeal to the most basic impulses of pop freaks....

Excuse me, my supervisory monitor shows that you haven’t been thinking very hard for the last 30 seconds. University of Illinois scientists say they can now measure mental activity through the scalp. Psychologist Arthur F. Kramer: “We know more about the [brain] voltage fluctuations in terms of psychological processes. We now have computer hardware that allows quick recordings from a large number of electrodes and does the analysis–measuring how busy a person’s mind is–almost in the blink of the eye....